The Skater

Wendy McMurdo is one of the UK’s leading lens-based artists who has evolved a singular photographic practice and iconography that explores the role digital technologies play in the construction of identity, particularly in relation to the psychological world of children and young people. The artist’s new body of work, The Skater, draws inspiration from Sir Henry Raeburn’s painting Reverend Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch, widely regarded as an image characteristic of the Scottish enlightenment. McMurdo’s image of the skater presents a similarly evocative motif. However, her work reflects a less utopian view, examining the impact of virtual technology on the lives of the young. The series is completed by striking portraits of young ‘gamers’, capturing a generation immersed in computer-mediated experiences. In collaboration with filmmaker Paul Holmes, she explores a circuitous world in which fantasy slides into reality and back again in her first film work, premiered at Ffotogallery, entitled The Loop.